Plutarch's adaptation of his source-material

Abstract

In an earlier article, I argued that six of the Roman Lives—Crassus, Pompey, Caesar, Cato, Brutus, and Antony—were prepared as a single project, and rest upon the same store of source-material. If this is so, it affords a unique opportunity to investigate Plutarch's techniques. There are substantial variations among these six versions, both crude inconsistencies of fact and subtler differences of interpretation. It no longer seems adequate to assume that these are simply inherited from differing source-material; they must arise from Plutarch's individual literary methods. Their analysis should therefore illuminate those methods. How much licence did Plutarch allow himself in rewriting and manipulating detail for artistic ends? And what considerations would lead him to vary his treatment in these ways?In the first part of this paper, I examine the literary devices which Plutarch employed in streamlining his material: conflation of similar items, chronological compression and dislocation, fabrication of circumstantial detail, and the like. In the second, I turn to the differences of interpretation and emphasis among these Lives. These suggest some wider conclusions concerning Plutarch's biographical practice, which are developed in the final section: in particular, the very different aims, interests, and conventions which are followed in different Lives, and the flexible nature of this biographical genre.